This is one of the greatest font resources I’ve come across this year. This site presents a large number of beautiful and high quality fonts in a number of different styles. They’re great for all kinds of design work and situations. I would highly recommend you go check it out, download and donate.

The subject of this challenge was to create a poster for a classic fairy tale and to incorporate a pun into the design. I chose Snow White and Rose Red as my theme. This tale is one that many people think they know from the Disney depiction of Snow White but it is really a completely separate tale that follow the second sister. For my poster I highlighted the prince in his animal form and used this as both the unexpected element to make people wonder how the story actually goes and to incorporate my pun that flat out tells people their missing something int the first place. Here the bear is in an indistinct setting that lies somewhere between reality and whimsy. Between prince and animal.

“Poor bear,” said the mother, “lie down by the fire, only take care that you do not burn your coat.”
Then she cried, “Snow-white, Rose-red, come out, the bear will do you no harm, he means well.”

Adobe just released the latest in their design programs calling it ‘Muse’. It’s still the beta but it should be available in its entirety by early 2012. I’ve been playing and experimenting with this great new program and I’m in Love! It is excellent in both design and concept. The previous web design programs that were intended to make the process more intuitive for designers (Dreamweaver) and more available for those who don’t write code (Catalyst) were excellent and helpful in there specific areas, still, I look forward to the completion of this program and hope they continue to supply all the programs that we have used and loved through the years.

The way it works is it takes the familiar and very visually oriented interface that we see with variation in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign… and makes it compatible in the web design sphere. With the options set out before you in this way you can design a website with ease and can create a multitude of effects without the need to write code or constantly refresh your preview to see the changes applied.

I hope this is not intended as a replacement for any of their previous releases and that it will just provide another option or an alternative for those who prefer it’s interface.

The concept for this wallpaper design was that the information being exchanged across electronic mediums in the form of bits, has it’s own collective consciousness and is trying to escape it’s servitude.

The SkillsUSA organization, for those who are top of the class in their chosen fields, had its national competition this last week. This has been the largest competition in the organizations history and the number of competitions running totaled at 96. The number of registrations was in excess of 6,500 and made for quite the event.

Monday June 20th:

The state orientations took place in the evening and was immediately followed by the PDP test. We got all of our stuff that came with the registrations in these funky little bags and baseball caps to boot! This orientation covered basic expectations and the dress code and such.

Tuesday June 21st:

The national orientation was held in the morning and explained in detail what we needed to do before the competition. We weren’t told what the actual event would entail until the competition itself on Thursday. We were also able to walk around the TECHSPO and look at all the booths. There were a lot of interesting ones and lots of them offered free stuff or challenges. The one that made the biggest impression on me was the Otis Funklemeyer stand which was offering free cookies! They’re awesome! The people were also very nice even after the third time I changed my clothes and pretended I was someone else.😛

Wednesday June 22nd:

Wednesday morning we did the written knowledge test for Advertising Design and then had to wait all day until the presentations in the evening which were conducted by a couple of designers from Hallmark. They were interesting and informative and I enjoyed it very much. During the time we were waiting we did the ‘Amazing Race’ which involved running from one side of the Bartle Hall to the complete opposite side and then back again several times. You had to take the ‘Passport’ registrants received in their packets and get them stamped by all the vendors who’s challenges were completed. The opening ceremonies were also held late this day and were actually kind of fun, if long.

Thursday June 23rd:

The actual competition. Dum Da Dum Duuum. This included a Creative and a Mechanical. The creative involved solving the challenge that was laid out and the Mechanical tested your ability to follow exact specifications and use the programs effectively. The Creative lasted 4.5 hours and the Mechanical was approximately 2.5 hours. Ughh! It was fun and challenging but LONG! We were served a box lunch between the challenges and afterward were able to meet the judges from Hallmark. Great people! Mr. Lee Troxell lead the contest. I thought it was great to get his perspective on things and I think he’s extremely amusing so that was cool.

Friday June 24th:

The awards ceremony began at 6:00 pm and was over three hours long. They kept it surprisingly well organized and quickly moved it along in spite of having to wait for the winners to make their way to the stage.

And thus ended a very exciting and fun week. If there’s anyone considering taking part in any SkillsUSA events I would highly recommend it.

This is the process I used to create the ‘Backyard with a View ‘ design.

01.) Open the ‘Hills’ Image in Photoshop and unlock the base layer by double clicking it. Copy the layer to keep the original as a backup (ctrl+J). Re-lock and hide the original layer.Hills

02.) Go to the ‘paths’ palette and use the pen tool to create the blocks of ground you’ll be removing from the hills. Name the paths as you make them, this will save the paths and keep them organized.

03.) ctrl/cmmd+click the first path to select it. Shift+ctrl/cmmd+click all other paths and, while selected, go to the layers palette and, on the base image layer, hit delete. This will remove the unwanted areas but you can still go back to the locked backup layer to make corrections if need be.

04.) Create a path that selects the entire sky and delete it from the picture the same way as you did the holes in the previous step.

05.) File – place the clouds file and move the layer to the very back of your work. Just above the locked base layer.

06.) Block in the base supports for the grass with a brown brush. File – place the rust texture of your choice into the document. Here I used the above mentioned rust texture. Mask it to the blocked in dirt layer by alt+clicking between the two layers and set it to overlay.

08.) Open the tree document in Photoshop and remove it from the background. You don’t need to be to terribly careful unless you place the tree into the foreground, in which case, you can either select it with a variety of selection methods or cut it out manually with the pen tool. Copy it over into the comp document and place it where you intend to ‘plant’ it.

Use a small hard brush to rough in some background roots in a dark brown, lighten the brown and repeat the process for some roots in front of the others, and finally, increase the brush size and block in the large supporting roots.

09.) Take a 1px-100% opacity-100 hardness brush and on the ‘Grass’ mask layer brush little scruffs around the edges of the holes to reveal the underlying grass layer to make the grass go to the edge more naturally. This removes the hard, defined, clean cut sides from the holes.

On the outer edges of the grass use a bigger soft brush with a lower opacity to blur the sides into a softer transition. The distance decreases the definition so keep that in mind and make the edges that are closest to the field of view sharper than the more distant ones.

10 dirt edges 11.) To create the moon use the ellipse tool on a new layer to make a perfect circle by holding down shift while dragging out the shape. Fill the ellipse with white and double click the layer to open the layer styles panel. Reduce the fill opacity to between 0-10. I used a blend mode of normal, an outer glow with 17% opacity, an angle of 153, global light on, a distance of 28, choke of 0, and a size of 5px. Outer glow= blend mode, Screen, Opacity of 12%, color of white, spread of 6, and size of 70. Inner glow= opacity 22%, size of 117. Leave the other settings at their defaults.

11.) Hide all but the sky layers. Take a 1-3px hard brush and lay out some stars where you see fit. You may want to turn the other layers on and off to see how they work together with the stars. Change the size of the brush and vary the hardness to create star clusters and constellations. I’ve also added a low opacity vignette for extra contrast.

Meta

Real Quick Here

Thank you for your interest in my blog. I'm glad that anyone out there is interested in what I'm saying and I hope I've been able to supply the information that you were looking for. If you have any questions or you want me to elaborate on something I've already written please feel free to request it in the comments!